EurasianStudies_0110..

January-March 2010 JOURNAL OF EURASIAN STUDIES Volume II., Issue 1.
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conversations range from tragedies suffered during World War II against the Jews, old flames,
family issues in the case of Galante, and imaginary boyfriends from several different
nationalities in the case of Pelin: Sarkis, an Armenian, Ivan, a Russian and Dimitri, a Greek.
Pelin also talks about her difficult relationship with her mother, who had left her and her father
and eloped with another man, and with her father as well, whom she does not get along well at
all. Galante, already old, in her eighties and awaits death to come soon. Her speech,
consequently, is fraught with words that have fallen out of use in modern Turkish, due to the
language reform, and she also uses others who Pelin does not even understand. The novel then
is perfect to discuss this issue of language change that has been largely unexplored by linguists.
Dil Devrimi and a brief background
The Turkish language reform, or Dil Devrimi, as the Turks very suitably call it and which
literally means “Language Revolution” in Turkish, is a rare phenomenon to happen in
languages, and which can, to my mind, only be compared to Modern Hebrew in scope. It all
started at the time of the World War I and the demise of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire
(1299-1923) when, with the help of a real hero to the Turks, Mustafa Kemal (to be later called
Atatürk, or Father of the Turks) led the country, doomed to be divided into several pieces by
European powers, to freedom and eventually to a full fledged Republic in 1923. Among the
many reforms proposed by Atatürk in order to modernize the country were the change of
alphabet, one based on Arabic, with some minor additions to make up for the phonemes that
occur in Turkish but not in Arabic, to a Latin one, again with some minor additions, such as
c /dj/, ş /š/, ı /“the dotless i”and ğ /:/. After the change of alphabet, however, Atatürk decided
that the Turkish language should be purged of, in principal, all Arabic and Persian borrowings,
which were to be replaced by “pure” Turkish words, or öztürkçe. When the task proved to be too
hard, for there were as many suggestions for new words as there were people to suggest
(common people were also invited to send in their suggestions), Atatürk ingeniously devised a
theory that, according to him, Turkish was the mother of all languages, the Güneş-Dil Teorisi, or
Sun Language Theory. By this time, however, the mess had been set up. Many people, from all
walks of life, felt the urge to create words according to their own fancy, which was clearly
leading to chaos. With the creation of the Türk Dil Kurumu, The Turkish Language Society, the
project was continued even after Atatürk’s death. The result is that (mainly) the lexicon changed
so much that such common words as “school” (mektep > okul), “result” (netice > sonuç),
“example” (misal > örnek), “situation” (vaziyet > durum), among many others, were introduced in
the language. Obviously, there was no way of knowing beforehand which words were going to
stay in the language and become part of it and which ones were fated to soon drop out of use
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